If you have ever wanted a gaming console that just about anyone could program games for, then you might be in luck. The new gaming console named 'OUYA' is based on Android, will be open source, and will enable people to develop games just like they do for Androids and iPads.

Supposedly this is a big thing. I'm not so sure, but the controller looks pimp.

The latest Minecraft Snapshot, is adding in basic LAN support, without need for a dedicated server!

From their site:

You can now use 'publish' to open your single-player game for LAN friends to join. This is still very much work in progress, so it lacks some necessary settings such as what game mode your friends will get, and if they should be able to use cheats or not. Also, the 'publish' command is temporary, you can't even access it if you haven't enabled cheats =)

The Ender Chest has been changed to have an inventory per player and not per world. Also, knocking down the chest will break it into 8 obsidian, unless you have Silk Touch.
The texture pack folder button now works on Mac
A lot of smaller changes and fixes

So, I was showed up by an older fellow today knowing a little more about the gaming culture than I gave him credit for. He told me of this TV show that talks about games. Maybe I didn't want to watch it because it was on the ABC (as we know most stuff on the abc is for <7 and >40 year olds).

Anyway, a gaming show that dates back to 2006 and is still alive today. Might be worth checking out...

"Apple has changed the answer Siri gives to the question 'what is the best smartphone ever?' to prevent the voice-driven assistant from promoting the Nokia Lumia 900. Originally Siri trawled online reviews on the web using the wolfram Alpha search engine, to come up with the Lumia, much to Apple's embarrassment. Now, apple has intervened, replacing that answer with a joke: 'Wait there are other phones?'"

Hey there all you awesome gamers. That's right, the time has come again for you all to block out your weekend to attend Insomnia. The LAN starts on Friday 21st October at 7pm and goes until Saturday 22nd October at 6pm. As always, Breakfast and lunch on the Saturday are provided.

So don't miss out on some awesome gaming fun. As always there will be CoD4, War3, Trackmania, Soldat. Fitting in some tetrinet might also appeal to some.

So invite your friends and make sure you don't miss the last event of 2011.

Dedicated Servers are a thing of the very near future for Terraria! Sometime within the next week or so Terraria 1.0.3 will be releasing. With Terraria 1.0.3 comes the new Dedicated Server executable that has DX stripped out so you can run it on your dedicated Windows box without having to have a special dedicated video card.

So many settings and features will also be included like admin commands, configuration settings to toggle features such as Blood Moons, Goblin Attacks, and much much more. You can even make dedicated PVP servers where everyone is force-flagged.

The biggest feature is that play cap is being removed for multiplayer and if your machine can handle it you can have up to 255 players online at once.

Just remember this post covers only the new dedicated server features; there is even more new content coming in 1.0.3 so stay tuned!

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Only problem is, as of yet, there's no Linux server available... Once there is, I will put one up in my sydney based Linux Dedicated servers for tLegioners :)

This is weird and awesome and just plain meanly clever.Guy brings in a broken 500GB hard drive. The guys at the tech place open it and discover....a 128mb flash drive wedged between two nuts in the enclosure. The clever bit is it apparently reports correct sizes and everything, just overwriting in a loop when you copy a file more than 128mb to it.

In case you lost something 40 years ago and were wondering if you would ever get it back....it does happen! Check out this story from the University of California:

"A team of physicists led by a professor at UC San Diego has pinpointed the location of a long lost light reflector left on the lunar surface by the Soviet Union nearly 40 years ago that many scientists had unsuccessfully searched for and never expected would be found."

Short article that made me laugh. Apple dares to take on the wife by returning an iPad2 to its owner after he returned it with a sticky note that read "Wife said no". Apples response note when they returned it? "Apple said yes".

IN a bizarre turn of events, the music industry players currently suing Limewire for $75 TRILLION DOLLARS (*puts pinky finger to corner of his mouth*).

To put this in perspective, that's about $15 Trillion more than the Gross Domestic Product of the entire planet. It's also significantly more than the entire revenue of the recording industry since Edison invented the Phonograph in 1877.

ON the more sensible side of things, the judge has decided the claims are ridiculous.

I think I am required by the law of morals to recommend this site and it's awesome idea.

If you are like me then you provide default technical support to every parent/sibling/cousin/grandparent/friend of the family - all out of the goodness of your own heart.

Needless to say, this means sighing in frustration, and lots of windows reinstalls to remove the endless wave of infections presented to you.

I was recommended this site a while ago and I have to say it is absolutely awesome for reinstalls.

You simply go to http://ninite.com/ and click all the basic applications you want installed (and it has nearly all of them) and it gives you a tiny 200kb installer which downloads and installs all the applications you selected. It automatically disables any toolbar addons and is completely hands free once you start it.

I just installed about 10 basic required applications for a new computer and it completed without a hitch. No doubt saved me about 2 hours of hunting, downloading and installing all seperately. Check it out. (P.S. The same installer can be reused to update all those programs at once too. - Now that is a fantastic idea!)

FAULT LINE SERIES EPISODE I: BAD PART OF TOWN
"Battlefield 3 leaps ahead of its time with the power of Frostbite(tm) 2, the next installment of DICE's cutting-edge game engine. This state-of-the-art technology is the foundation on which Battlefield 3 is built, delivering enhanced visual quality, a grand sense of scale, massive destruction, dynamic audio and incredibly lifelike character animations. As bullets whiz by, walls crumble, and explosions throw you to the ground, the battlefield feels more alive and interactive than ever before. In Battlefield 3, players step into the role of the elite U.S. Marines where they will experience heart-pounding missions across diverse locations including Paris, Tehran and New York"

Sometimes I love science just for the sheer ridiculousness of it. Apparently we can finally discover who has the strongest blood of them all. Blood Wars is an art-science installation that will pit white blood cells from two different people against each other in a "tournament" that aims to see which person has the strongest immune system.

Welcome to what should be another great year for gaming! We've got our first Insomnia of the year coming up on the 18th and 19th of February at a new location - Newlife Church at Sandgate! This will start at 7pm on Friday, and run through to 8pm on Saturday night. A bit of a change, but this allows us to run the LAN for $20, and includes breakfast and lunch on Saturday. Limited Internet access for game authentication will also be available once again, allowing games such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops to be played, as well as Steam authentication.

Click the Events button at the top of the page to sign up, and don't forget to join us in the forums to talk about this upcoming event!

As reported by Slashdot (one of the largest tech websites in the world, if you haven't heard of it where have you been living? http://www.slashdot.org) Google has run a 'sting operation' showing proof that Bing has been learning search results from the search engine giant - Google. Ruh Roh...

You've all been crying out for it. As you know we've had issues securing a venue for LAN's this year. I'm glad to announce we have been able to secure the Conference Facilities at the small St Joseph's Conference Center.

With this we will have access to a full Kitchen, Shower/Amenities Block and BEDS!

Hey there folks. It is that time of the year again. Time for the mid-year Narcoleps-E!

Get your gaming face on for some fun!

The LAN will be on the 17th and 18th of July with signups opening on the 3rd of July and Confirmations opening on the 10th of July. Lets keep Narc going strong people. See you there for some fun filled, fragging times!

The Register (UK). There's big news from the world of rayguns this week, as the US Navy has announced successful use of a laser cannon fitted to its well-known "R2-D2" robotic gun turret installation to shoot down other, flying robots in a test.

Five other unmanned air vehicles have previously been burned down by what is known officially as the Laser Weapon System (LaWS).

AUSTRALIANS with generous internet plans will have another reason to avoid video stores on Thursday when Sony launches a movie download service for its PlayStation 3 game console.

The movie download service will feature more than 600 movies at launch after Sony signed all major film studios just days before its announcement today.

Sony Network Entertainment marketing director Alison Turner said movies would be available to rent from $3.99 each, or would cost from $7.99 to buy.

The collection of new release - including Avatar, Sherlock Holmes and Twilight New Moon - and classic titles will be available in standard or high-definition from 1am on Thursday.

But users will must have generous download allowances to use the service, as Ms Turner said some movies will be up to 8GB in size.

"Standard-definition films will use about 2GB and that should take up to an hour to download," she said.

"High-definition films will take 8GB or about three hours to download."
Ms Turner said users could start watching a film after it started downloading, or play games on the console while they waited for their film to arrive.

Sony Computer Entertainment Australia head Michael Ephraim said the service was launched as part of an effort to make the three-year-old PlayStation 3 a home-entertainment hub and broaden its audience beyond games.

The Sony PlayStation movie download service will compete with video download services from Microsoft's Xbox 360 and another from TiVo launched last year, as well as Apple's iTunes Store.

Call of Duty: Black Ops will be getting dedicated servers, according to studio head Mark Lamia.

When asked whether the popular feature would be present in Black Ops in the new issue of PC Zone, Lamia replied, "I think dedicated servers are excellent. I don't see any reason not to see them unless... well, I just don't see any reason not to."

"It seems people like them and we're excited about what we're doing right now."

Lamia showed his appreciation of how much dedicated servers meant to a lot of PC gamers:

"We do work very hard to reconcile the desire to manipulate and modify those dedicated servers with offering them the persistent experience and benefits that the console system provides."

"We're working very hard to marry those two things, so people can run dedicated servers and also participate in the communal experience the console players get to have, given they're all on first-party servers."

Rumours of dedicated servers for CoD: Black Ops surfaced at the end of March after leaks from 'undisclosed Activision sources'.

CHINESE and Turkish evangelical explorers believe they may have found Noah's Ark - 4000m up a mountain in Turkey.

The team said it had recovered wooden specimens from a structure on Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey that carbon dating proved was 4800 years old, around the same time the ark is said to have been afloat.

"It's not 100 per cent that it is Noah's Ark but we think it is 99.9 per cent that this is it," said Yeung Wing-cheung, a Hong Kong documentary filmmaker and member of the 15-strong team from Noah's Ark Ministries International.

The structure had several compartments, some with wooden beams, which were believed to house animals, he said.

The group of evangelical archaeologists ruled out an established human settlement on the grounds that one had never been found above 3500m in the vicinity, Mr Yeung said.

Local Turkish officials would ask the central government in Ankara to apply for UNESCO World Heritage status so the site could be protected while a major archaeological dig was conducted, he added.

The biblical story says God decided to flood the earth after seeing how corrupt it had become, and told Noah to build an ark and fill it with two of every animal species.

After the flood waters receded, the Bible says, the ark came to rest on a mountain. Many believe that Mount Ararat, the highest point in the region, is where the ark and her inhabitants came aground.

India seems to have made an interesting copyright bill. It declares private, personal copying to be "fair dealing" (like US fair use) and limits the prohibition on breaking DRM so that it's only illegal to do so if you're also violating copyright.

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Sources close to the development studio tells Kotaku the mood at Infinity Ward (the studio behind 2009's biggest game) is terrible and corporate parent Activision is unsure how to fix it. Reporting, "[Infinity Ward] will continue to crumble."

Hey y'all Narcoleps-E confirmations are open so if you intend to come to the Dubbo LAN hurry up and sign up then confirm so we can get food for ya! Narc is on this weekend, the 10th and 11th of April. It's looking like a smallish one again but it keeps trundling on. If you're already signed up tell your friends about it, its a great weekend of gaming, good food and laughs. Can't think of much else you can do for $20 with 3 meals and 24 hours or more of gaming!

As you are already aware from previous posts, we are a bit short on admins, especially with setting up, packing up, and running the event.

We would like to form an "Insomnia Crew" of gamers who would be interested in helping us run the events. You don't need to be a Christian to join this crew, however we expect you to uphold our rules and values at the events you are assisting us with.

To be on the crew you will need to be able to commit to coming to the LAN's for a year - up to four. And be able to make yourself available online for a pre-lan meeting approximately 2 weeks prior to each of those events.

If you have any interest in helping out, put your name down in the linked forum, and an Admin will contact you to discuss with you.

With your help we can keep Lanning going in Newcastle and hopefully grow it as well.

If anyone remembers the old Settlers from the Mid 90's, you'll remember it was one of the base Sim/Strategy Games out there (After Dune).

Well, it's still going, however it appears that Ubisoft's new DRM has ended up ruining the franchise for us Aussies. The DRM uses a callback which requires an active stable internet connection to play ANY part of the game. Another step towards the destruction of PC Games, and especially the LAN Gaming environment.

I know I for one decided not to buy it after hearing about the DRM being included. The first one I haven't bought since 1995.

Hey guys and girls. Narcoleps-E will soon be upon us once again. If you turn your gaze to the events page you will see that signups are open for the event which will be on the 10th and 11th of April. Usual price of $20 for Narc to get you some grub and fragging for a weekend in Dubbo. Hope to see you there when it rolls around. Tell your freinds! Narc lives!

Battlefield - Bad Company 2 is infact in good company with titles like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Over 2.3 million sold worldwide, the game seems to have taken off going double platinum in just 2 weeks.

In a move that was not predicted by any of us, South Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson has stepped down from the front bench.

Although this may not be big news normally, the fact that Atkinson has been the single Attorney-General from State level that has blocked any attempt at making the R18+ classification enjoyed by movies and other media also available to games.

For any change to the classification system to be made all AG's from the states had to at least agree to talk about it. Atkinson wasn't. Although this isn't listed as the main reason why he stood down, the pressure placed on him from gamers throughout the country has been enormous.

As a retailer I used to have a big issue with the fact that many games at MA15 level would have been R18 movies. Now parents will have a decent level of information presented about these games and gaming adults will have the choice to censor the content they see, not the government.